In a computer network, such as a data center, data is transmitted from a source to a destination in the form of packets that generally pass through one or more networking devices (e.g., switches, routers, firewalls, etc.). During the transmission, packets are generally temporarily stored in one or more network buffers of the networking devices.
Certain data center customers demand network architectures that can provide low latency, high bandwidth, and often massive scalability. However, measuring latency may be difficult and time sensitive applications often do not have the proper visibility into how it has taken for packets to reach a certain destination and when packets were actually sourced at specific locations in the network.